On the path of self-development (K. Balashov)

​Dozens of sites and blogs in the Russian-language Internet are devoted to self-development and self-improvement, and contain many useful tips. But what is self-development and self-improvement? There are two main formulations. The first is all that is done for the better, then self-development. He refrained, did not drink beer in the evening, he self-developed. The second measures self-development in money. Self-development, earn a million. It is clear that the first formulation leads not so much to self-development, but to self-deception, and the second - at least insufficiently complete.

A fairly wide list of areas of self-development can be found on the website of Steve Pavlina: http://www.stevepavlina.com.

• Order: Create a daily routine that will help your life to flow fruitfully

• Health: Recover your best habits and do it your body is strong and healthy

• Relationships: Enjoy the love of loved ones and love of loved ones, and this love will help you grow

• Spirituality: Improve your self-understanding and live more consciously

Steve also lists the core values ​​that They serve as guidelines: True: Accept reality as it is, and purify your life of lies and denial of facts.

• Love: Improve your ability to unite with yourself and others.

• Power: Build your motivation and discipline to build your life as you want

• Unity : Stop fighting against everything that resists, and make the surrounding world your ally.

• Reins: Take control of destiny in your own hands, and learn to make clear and clear decisions.

• Courage: Gather your inner strength and act to overcome fear.

• Mind: D May he, and exhibit their creativity

Thanks Steve Pavlina, but the list is missing something very important. First we will understand what we need for self-development. To be healthy. To be happy. In order not to have financial problems. To have a wonderful, harmonious relationship with others. All this is correct. But self-development is a process. The accumulated means of self-development are very powerful. If you seriously engage in self-development, very soon, in a year or two, health will improve, internal harmony will appear, relations with relatives will improve, financial issues will be solved, and so on. What to do next? Continue to develop? But it will not be where to attach itself. To play tic-tac-toe does not need a supercomputer, to go to a bakery across the road - a helicopter.

Most likely, the problems will start much earlier. When most of the goals are achieved, interest in self-development will begin to get lost, and everything will slowly crawl back "into place." You will say - I can self-develop, I tried and I succeeded, if necessary - I will do it again, so you can go to drink beer and watch TV.

Steve Pavlina intuitively understands this. On his website, he tells how he walked from goals-for-himself to goals-for-others. At some point, he made a sharp turn-he dropped his business and created a web site stevepavlina.com. In the article about 5-second marketing, in the formulation of its current goals, he puts at the heart of this is helping people. But, unfortunately, he, apparently, does not consider this a natural stage of self-development, and does not add to the general scheme.

Steve Pavlina is by far not the only author on this topic. There are also Brian Tracy, Tony Robins, Napoleon Hill and others, as well as a number of Russian-speaking authors. But they, too, mainly concentrate on how to become rich and successful themselves.

Let’s summarize:

• Growth continues as long as there is room for growth. When the growth ends, the creeping back begins.

• Growth "for oneself" is limited to oneself. To grow continued, you need to go beyond yourself, ie. help not only themselves, but others.

• In order for the growth to go smoothly and smoothly, you need to help people in the self-development plan from the very beginning.

Setting goals

If you go to the forest for mushrooms - come back with mushrooms. If you follow the berries - come back with berries. If you go without knowing what, you will return with a rotten stump, which you then throw out - and what else should you do with it? Before you start self-development, you must first formulate goals. Otherwise you’ll get a rotten stump. Goals need to be formulated with certainty, without "I hope" and "not bad". The more concrete it is to formulate them, the better. The wording should contain not a direction, and not a process, but an end result.

Before formulating goals, you need to define the terminology. Steve Paulina has an article about the ultimate and intermediate goals. We will call ultimate goals simply "goals", and intermediate ones - "tasks."

Goals should be permanent, tasks - flexible. For example, if the goal is to become well-read, and the task is to "read books from such a list for as many as a month," then the task can be flexible in that instead of reading you can listen to audiobooks, and the reading schedule can be adapted to life , say, do breaks in reading for more priority tasks. Of course, the goals will also change, because you will change, and the world around you will change. The main thing is that they should not be corrected infrequently, and they change from low-level to high-level, from small help to people to large, from helping smaller groups of people to help all of humanity. Goals are put for many years to come. They must be clearly and clearly articulated and written down. Steve Paulina recommends writing them in large letters and hanging on the walls. Tasks are set for a month, a quarter, a year. They, too, must be clearly and clearly articulated and written down.

I realized for myself an important thing - do not be afraid to set yourself ambitious tasks, the main thing is to detail them in detail and draw up a plan for implementation.

It is much more pleasant to achieve a result not on all points of an ambitious plan, than on all points of sluggishness - checked by personal experience. The second reason why tasks should be ambitious is that you plan to grow and develop. What seems complicated now will be too simple in a year. You have to set yourself the tasks of "power", so that they correspond to your future level. More details about this can be found in my article "Goals, Means, and Their Mutual Conformity," which it would be more correct to call "Tasks, Means, and Their Correspondence."

MTBF

Obviously, you will need physical health, it is advisable not to be distracted by financial problems, it is desirable to build relationships with others so that they will rejoice and fill with energy, and not take away the forces. Sites for self-development contain many recipes to improve their own effectiveness. They will help you form a lot of useful skills.

Understanding that efficiency is a useful tool, but not an end in itself, will help you correctly prioritize. It is necessary to find a balance between efficiency and the desire to develop comprehensively. Microsoft motivator J.D. Meier says that to achieve maximum efficiency, you should not try to develop your weaknesses as much as possible, but to do what is your strength. In pursuit of the "harmony of development," we often forget about this, and spend too much energy trying to learn what we do not have neither traction nor abilities.

An important, but rarely mentioned, means is an understanding of what is happening. It’s not about esotericism or mysticism. There are dialectical laws of development of events in structure and in time. There are psychological theories that adequately model the behavior of people. As you study them, what seems strange and unexpected for others will become obvious and logical for you.

Another useful exercise - to read quality literature, and to understand how the hero developed and why. A deeper understanding of what is happening will give you more opportunities to manage events, more effectively solve problems. In many cases, it is possible to create, with minimal effort, objective prerequisites in which a laborious or even unsolvable task will be solved by itself. But for this little knowledge of the theory, you need to do the exercises, and develop practical skills.

When you begin to actively help others, you will come across other "helpers". Their motives may not be as noble as yours, and stuffing your own pockets is still far from the worst option. Many of them use ugly tricks like logical tricks. You will have to learn them to resist them. To develop skills to recognize dishonest methods of persuasion, it is useful to read Wikipedia.

Leadership

As you grow, more and more challenging tasks will become possible for you. Your self-confidence will grow, and the walls around you will begin to move apart, like around Neo in the "Matrix".

Rather, the walls will not move apart, but people will do as best for you, much more willingly.

At this stage, it is important that your psychological problems, hidden sources of insecurity, do not prevent you from leading people. If something prevents you from loudly voicing your goals, and ask others to help you achieve them, try to understand why this is happening, and solve this problem. Otherwise it will be insulting to light a lamp to put it under the bed.

The reverse side of leadership is responsibility. On the one hand, you need to ensure that the decisions you make are in balance with the responsibility that you are responsible for them. On the other hand, in order to develop leadership, it is necessary to temporarily remove this system from the balance sheet, take on more responsibility, and then try to get the corresponding rights.

More details about this are written here.

In one of the English-language motivational audiobooks, which I have already given to someone for a long time, the author recommended to build your life from the very beginning, as if you are a major public figure and your life is in the public eye. He said - if you grow and develop, sooner or later you will become a major public figure. And at this stage you will be much easier if you do not have skeletons in the closet. When there are no ugly moments that you can put in reproach, if you have nothing to blackmail, to live in the mind is much easier. The main thing is not to go too far, and not allow outsiders to interfere in their personal and family life.

On the other hand, if you have done some big ugly deeds - recognize them as Steve Pavlina did, otherwise they will slow you down on the path of self-improvement.

Again about the purpose

That means and resources at a certain stage you will have too much, sounds beautiful, but for the majority - is unattainably far. When you are at the very beginning of the journey, you are not up to the global goals. It is necessary to begin with the distribution of efforts between helping oneself and others in the proportion of 80% - 20%, and if absolutely everything is bad - then 90% - 10%. Help yourself, improve your life. By the time when life is right, you will have more powerful tools to change the world for the better.

Where can you apply these public 10% - 20% right now? At the very first stage, while goals are not formulated, you can simply help people in their good endeavors, talk about self-development, and show an active life position.

To set goals, you need to figure out what you can do best, and what you would like to do. Someone (for example, I) enjoys teaching others in courses and trainings, and someone does not have a soul to teach, but he can train well, say, a school sports team. Someone will do well to help people maintain human dignity in difficult conditions.

The first thing that comes to the head of prison. But even in hospitals in the post-Soviet space people still have a terrible attitude - a few people recently treated patients there with unpleasant memories, and said that it is better not to get there. It should not be. In America, for example, in hospitals, patients are treated with great respect, and they try to make them feel comfortable.

Someone better get to help people fight addictions, for example, with alcoholism, drug addiction, dependence on computer games. Someone can find their purpose in conveying to people objective, reliable information, developing Wikipedia or some independent media.

Despite the appeal of political goals, I strongly do not recommend starting with them. At the initial stage of self-development this will be equivalent to an attack on a pack of sharks with a penknife.

Mentoring

Nothing so improves the effectiveness of self-development, as the presence of a mentor, teacher, mentor. Many smart, worthy people will agree to help you, if you can clearly articulate what exactly you are trying to achieve, and what kind of help you need. Of course, not everyone will agree to be your mentor, but, fortunately, there are many smart and decent people. Try it! Do not give up I tried to formulate how to make self-development the whole life. Then everything depends on you.

Do not give up!

As Steve Pavlina says, "Remember that failure is not the opposite of success, failure is an essential part of success." The main thing is to analyze the failures and learn from them. And may your life be filled with meaning!